Rescue robots could help in next Turkish mine disaster

Even to those who study mining disasters, last week’s explosion in Soma, Turkey, was shocking.

“It’s the big one,” says Patrick Foster, a mining engineer at the University of Exeter, UK. “It’s huge.”

The official cause of the explosion is unknown, but it is thought to have started with a spark from electrical equipment that ignited coal dust or methane. The death toll is nearly 300, and dozens of people are still missing. While citizens in Turkey respond with angry protests, engineers around the world are working to prepare fleets of robots to help with the next disaster.

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“The technology needs further refinement, but it is out there,” says Brian Hart of Black-i Robotics in Tyngsboro, Massachusetts. Unfortunately, the Turkish disaster came before the robots were ready.

Robot failures

Mine explosions like the one in Turkey are typically caused when methane gas builds up and ignites, and the flames are carried quickly by flammable coal dust hanging in the air. Other countries like the US and the UK have adopted relatively low-tech solutions to prevent explosions and keep them from spreading, such as putting steel boxes around electronics to contain sparks, or spreading stone dust throughout the mine to dilute the coal dust and dampen the flames.

But when things go wrong, a burned-out mine can be a dangerous place for rescue workers. So mine safety engineers want to send robots to scout ahead of humans to test the air quality and find safe routes to trapped survivors, and perhaps even carry them out.

Such efforts have been plagued with challenges. After the Crandall Canyon mine in Utah collapsed in 2007, killing six miners, a camera scout robot got stuck in a borehole. Four robots succumbed to water damage in the Pike River Mine in New Zealand, where a methane explosion in 2010 killed 29 people, leading some to call it the “Robotic Bermuda Triangle“.

Designed for the job

There are signs that the technology is maturing. This week, the US Office of Mine Safety and Health Research called for proposals for robots that can be lowered into boreholes, explore up to about 1000 metres ahead of rescue teams, and act as pack mules.

Companies are beginning to design robots specifically for coal mines, instead of repurposing bomb-detecting robots, which are often too top heavy to navigate the narrow mine tunnels. One example is the Gemini Scout, developed by Sandia National Labs in New Mexico and prepared for commercial use by Black-i Robotics.

“Gemini Scout is probably the best all-terrain robot specifically designed for this environment,” Hart says.

“Robotics in general is advancing in leaps and bounds,” says Declan Vogt at the South African Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, who is working on robots that can help automate gold mining.

Robots ready!

When the robots are ready, getting them to the site of a disaster in time will be crucial.

“The problem with robots is you have to have them before the disaster,” Hart says. He says there were bureaucratic barriers to getting Gemini Scout robots to Turkey.

“We were trying to get those robots to Turkey but it was not possible,” he says. “It was very frustrating.”

Engineers in Turkey are interested in building up their disaster robotics capabilities, says Robin Murphy of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue at Texas A&M University, who spoke at a workshop in Turkey last year.

“Unfortunately it takes time and sustained investment to create a robotics capability for handling such a tragedy and the mine disaster was too soon,” she wrote in a statement.

Written in blood

Ultimately, though, robots alone won’t cut it. The most efficient way to keep miners from dying is better regulations, says Celeste Monforton at George Washington University in Washington DC, a former policy adviser for the US Mine Safety and Health Administration.

“There are ways to mine coal safely, and coal miners don’t have to die in the hundreds every year,” she says. “But that takes a level of investment, and also a regulatory system that is going to mandate those kind of controls.” She says that, while mine deaths are down to an average of 27 a year in the past 7 years in the US, they only dropped after a coal mine health and safety act was passed in 1969 – and that only came after an explosion in Farmington, West Virginia, killed 72 miners.

“There’s an old saying, the new laws are written with the blood of coal miners,” she says. No matter how well developed the technologies are, disasters like the one in Turkey may be the only thing that gets them to market.